2019 Illinois Waterway Aerial Image Mosaics

The Corps of Engineers' Rock Island District is planning an unprecedented closure of the Illinois Waterway in 2020 in order to perform required maintenance on locks. Aerial imagery will document river conditions prior to the closure (2019) and after the locks are reopened (2021). Under a separate but related effort, aerial imagery of the entire Illinois Waterway will be collected in 2020 as part of the decadal Upper Mississippi River System Land Cover/Land Use mapping project.

The imagery has a resolution of approximately 0.4 meter/pixel (16 inches). The imagery was collected on September 17, 2019 with a Phase One iXU-R 180 RGB camera co-mounted with a Phase One iXU-RS 160 Achromatic camera to create 4-band imagery that can be displayed as either true-color (RGB) or color-infrared (CIR). However, a system failure on one of the flight missions resulted in only RGB imagery for those flight lines. Alton, LaGrange, Peoria, Starved Rock and a portion of Marseilles were collected in 4-band (River Miles 1-260). The remainder of Marseilles, Dresden, and Brandon were collected in 3-band (River Miles 261-291).